GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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Meta is all-in on AI, and sometime soon, the company is going to make a big push into personal AI agents that can do things on your behalf.
On Wednesday’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed a high-level vision of how the company is thinking about personal agents and what it will do to make them viable for users — and how it will convince less technical people to give them a shot:
Soon we will have agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want. The first domain that agents have really taken off in is coding. But engineers are more technical and willing to spend time making those agents work, so to build great personal agents, this needs to be a great consumer product that just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people to adopt and use.
Zuckerberg seems to be trying to differentiate his vision from that of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which have invested heavily in agents focused on coding and enterprise work. Google has also made a push into personal AI agents with its Gemini Spark tool, which I found to be very good but to an almost creepy degree, and it’s unclear right now how Meta’s potential agents might compare.
However, Meta could have an uphill battle in personal agents. Its AI efforts still lag behind the bigger AI labs. Unlike Google or Microsoft, it doesn’t have ecosystem access to people’s email or documents in the way Google or Microsoft do. And Meta is dealing with a different creep problem right now with smart glasses, and general distrust toward Meta might make people unwilling to use its agents.
The company will have more to share about its personal agents “soon,” Zuckerberg said. Earlier in the call, he said that personal agents will be “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead.”
Zuckerberg also highlighted Meta’s business agents that are available on WhatsApp and Messenger, and he said that more than 1 million businesses are using them every week. The business agents are being rolled out to Instagram as well, Zuckerberg said.
During the Q2 2026 earnings call, Zuckerberg also said that Instagram now has more than 2 billion daily active users.